Kyo Ya

At Kyo Ya in the East Village, pressed sushi with salmon.Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

SOME facts are beyond the reach of search engines. This is probably lucky for all of us, and it is especially lucky for those who go to eat at Kyo Ya. A Japanese hideaway in the middle of the East Village, Kyo Ya gives up its secrets slowly. Learning them is part of the adventure.

The restaurant, which turned five years old last month, has no Web site. Reservations cannot be made through OpenTable. Any menu you manage to turn up online is likely to be seriously out of date. If Kyo Ya has opinions about bankers or fracking, they remain untweeted.

Even in three dimensions, Kyo Ya can be elusive. Whenever I take friends there, I ask them to meet me on Seventh Street, just east of First Avenue. If I don’t, I will end up studying the menu at length until my phone trembles with a text message: “I’m outside. Where is this place?”

It is below street level, at the bottom of an iron staircase marked by a carved sign that says, not too helpfully, Open. Once you make your way inside, welcomed by hosts who always seem delighted by your arrival, you look around, smile and start to unwind.

The restaurant — floors, tables, counters, chairs, walls, doors, spoons, trays, even toilet seats — is made almost entirely of wood, with one long curving wall of stacked panels that fit together so well they make you want to take up carpentry. It is a room that restores all five of your senses if you have spent your day flicking away at pixels.

And it puts you in the right frame of mind for the food of Kyo Ya’s chef, Chikara Sono. Like much Japanese cuisine, it is grounded in the shapes and rhythms of the natural world, and in respect for the seasons.

It is easy in New York now to believe that eating ramps in April makes you an expert in seasonal cooking. As a meal at Kyo Ya will show, this is a little like believing that eating a tuna salad sandwich makes you a marine biologist. It’s a wide world out there.

And it’s a wide world in here. Fans of Japanese food trust that Mr. Sono will find a way to serve rarely seen ingredients the minute their fleeting season begins. A couple of weeks ago, Kyo Ya offered a taste of spring’s first young bamboo shoots. The spiky leaves were peeled back like corn husks to expose the tender core, barely marked by the grill, seasoned with soy and flecks of kinome, the leaves of the sansho pepper plant.

Mr. Sono’s most highly evolved display of right-now seasonality is the kaiseki menu, a procession of courses following a model that evolved over centuries. In February, I reserved one of the 10 spots for the kaiseki meal served nightly. Deep winter may not be the ideal time to appreciate a style of cooking that tries to showcase ingredients at their absolute peak. Still, I was transfixed by course after course, each a study in the forms and flavors of roots and leaves and marine life.

A gratin of creamy sesame tofu with bits of deeply sweet blue shrimp was like a Japanese translation of shrimp and grits, and a great translation, too. Poached burdock mousse tasted the way the woods smell after it rains. Most astonishing of all was a plate of scallops in a sea-urchin butter so richly pleasurable that the only intelligent response was total submission.

If you have heard of Kyo Ya, chances are you have been told that the kaiseki menu is the thing to get. It is a rare treat, no question, but so are many of the dishes that can be ordered à la carte with a smaller investment of time and money. If you eat this way, your meal will be less epic, but it can be just as enjoyable. Not every good tale is a novel.

A compelling short story could be written about the chawanmushi, the traditional savory egg custard, served steaming hot with shrimp, ginkgo nuts and other little treasures hidden inside. It was so silky it made silk feel like pavement.

Another could be told about the slowly simmered kurobuta kakuni, a pork belly that stands out even in a city that is full of them. And there is another story in the sweet potato that is steamed twice, then fried tempura style and eaten with a few drops of soy sauce. And another in the black cod in a miso glaze. No matter how many times you’ve had this dish, the version here can still make you shake your head in amazement.

With every meal at Kyo Ya, I found another dish to add to my list of favorites, or a subtle new sake, or a deeply aromatic tea I’d never tasted before. With all of this, I was delicately guided by servers who were almost balletic in their gracefulness and nearly clairvoyant in their attentiveness. Toward the end of what had sounded when we’d placed our order like a very full meal, a server seemed to sense that we were still hungry even before we did. He mentioned a plate of sashimi. It was exactly enough.

Much of the menu is likely to succeed with almost anyone, but some of Mr. Sono’s cooking can leave behind those who aren’t prepared to follow the Japanese palate down every winding path.

One of my companions could not quite come to terms with the texture of cold sea urchin lobes and tofu skins bobbing in a milky broth. Another balked at lifting glassy baby eels with chopsticks. On a recent night, I faced a tiny but powerful cup of fermented squid in a sauce of its own liver. If fried calamari is a sunny day on the coast, this was a cold night near the ocean floor. I found it thrilling, but not everyone would.

But even my most cautious friends went wild for the pressed sushi, which is rarely served in New York. The rice is fortified with shiso, two kinds of ginger, scallion, fried kelp and sesame seeds. The fish is placed on top, and the whole thing is squeezed into a tight rectangle. In the most arresting version I had, salmon trout was gift-wrapped in a papery sheet of oboro kombu seaweed that looked like green marble.

There is more to learn, but that pleasure should be yours. I’ll stop here.

Kyo Ya

NYT Critics’ Pick

★★★

94 East Seventh Street

(First Avenue)

East Village

212-982-4140

AtmosphereAn underground sanctuary built of wood, with tables in the front, two counters and a tatami room. Service is graceful and intuitive.